Several Rhode Island merchant families (most notably…

Several Rhode Island merchant families (most notably the Browns, for whom Brown University is named) begin in the late eighteenth century to actively engage in the triangle slave trade on which the Rhode Island economy largely depends, and in which Rhode Islanders distill rum from molasses, send the rum to Africa to trade for slaves, and then trade the slaves in the West Indies for more molasses.

In the years after the Revolution, Rhode Island merchants will control between sixty and ninety percent of the American trade in enslaved Africans.

In February 1784, the Rhode Island Legislature passes a compromise measure for gradual emancipation of slaves within Rhode Island.

All children of slaves born after March 1 are to be "apprentices," the girls to become free at eighteen, the boys at twenty-one.